Mac
Mini: all you need to upgrade from PC for $499!
(Courtesy of Apple)

WHERE
TO GET THEM

The bad news
is that Apple polices their dealers very carefully and encourages
them to the very limits of the Sherman
Antitrust Act to sell at
full retail price. The only discounts you're likely to get is a spiff
like some free RAM thrown in. There's only about 10% above-the-line
profit in it for big dealers anyway.

The good news
is that you may as well buy from the store with the best service.
For me that's The
Apple Store.

You can visit
any retail Apple
Store and drive any of these machines in Photoshop or most other
programs for as long as you like before you buy. Bring in your photos
or video files or whatever and drive the computers and applications
to your heart's content. The retail Apple
Stores have every machine connected to high-speed Internet
and loaded with PhotoShop and more software than any of us could
afford for display and test drives. Everyone working at an Apple
Store is also ridiculously well informed; each of these people actually
owns and uses Apples themselves. I've honestly never met any
salesforce, including those of which I've been a part, as helpful
as those at Apple.

That's how
I selected my iBook. I played with everything in the Apple Store
and clocked how fast things ran in PhotoShop.

Different Apple
Stores will have different amounts of RAM installed in their machines.
Some stores just have the base amount while other stores load them
up. This is trivial to see, just click the
Apple logo in the upper right and select ABOUT THIS MAC. That will
tell you the operating system, processor speeds and how much RAM
it has. Want to know more? Just click MORE INFO in that same window.
Easy.

I avoid other
places like CompUSA and Fry's for Apple.
I've never met any knowledgeable people there and they have no internet
connections or software loaded on the computers so you can't do anything
on them to try. You may as well buy from the Apple Store since it's
the same price.

I was in an
Apple store on Sunday and the first guy I spoke to, like everyone
there, had a real answer to every involved question I had. Later
I went to a CompUSA store, where the well-intentioned but inexperienced
and untrained sales help had to resort to looking at their newspaper
ad to answer what machine cost what! Even worse, CompUSA's prices
were the same, except that their demo models cost more than the demos
at the Apple store, and of course the demo machines at CompUSA are
useless because they aren't connected to the internet and they have
almost everything locked out so you just can't try the Apples on
display.

This is my
experience being lucky enough to have an Apple store here in San
Diego, California. Your results will vary: I hear there was a genuine
Apple rep, Jack, at the CompUSA on North Blackstone Avenue in Fresno
in 2005 who was fantastic. He knew everything and usually
fixed any problems on the spot. If I was in Fresno
that's where I would have gone, except that as of 2006 I'm told
he moved to Bakersfield. I don't know if he's still is seen at CompUSA.

Just know if
you're not getting the service you expect that you always can
get it elsewhere.

WHEN
TO GET THEM

With cameras
we usually have a month or so between announcement and when we can
get new products. I've never been bitten by buying a camera and having
it become obsolete the4 next day without warning.

Computers come and go daily. If a product has been out
a while then an upgrade could be right around the corner. Here's a
great tabulation of how old each model is. This ought to guide you
to know how fresh any model is.

SUMMARY

Whatever Apple
you buy you should enjoy it immensely. Any of them today will do
all I need for anything.

I may prefer
to have a hulking desktop system with 16 GB of RAM, but it's not
needed. Your time and wallet are the deciding factors.

Even my over
five-year-old dual G4 desktop still works great with the latest OS
10.4 operating system. Now you know why we Mac users spend so little
time worrying about our hardware and just get work done.